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A system to organise projects

Where we loosely define ‘a project’ as ‘a collection of things you keep on a computer’

When we kept everything on paper, organised people had these things called filing cabinets. They stored all of their documents in them in a structured way so that they could find them again.

Now those same people store all of their files in arbitrarily named folders on their company’s shared drive and wonder why they can’t find anything.

Nobody can find anything any more

Thousands of emails. Hundreds of files. File structures created on a whim and six layers deep. Duplication of content, lost content. We thought search would save us from this nightmare, but we were wrong.

The frustration I see in organisations is palpable. The time and energy wasted is unimaginable.

It’s time to get organised. Here’s how

This is just an overview: we’ll get to the details shortly

There are a couple of core concepts, and they’re so simple you’ll wonder why you haven’t thought of them before.

It’s worth mentioning at this point that all of this is free, and you can implement it now without any additional tools.

Step 1: Divide everything in to ten things

Take everything you need to organise and sort it in to, at most, ten large buckets.

Put a label on each bucket.

Make sure the buckets are unambiguously different.

This forces you to group things quite broadly, but that’s the point.

We call these buckets your areas. An area might be Finance.

Step 2: In each area, divide in ten again

Go through each bucket and repeat the process. This creates your categories.

A category within the Finance area might be Tax returns.

Now we have ten areas which contain ten categories each. That’s a hundred categories at the very most. It’s very unlikely you will end up with a hundred categories.

Categories are the key

What’s a category? It’s just a collection of stuff. Book drafts. Travel itineraries. Lease agreements. Test reports. Contracts. Any type of work you do can become a category.

The point is that you’ve defined these categories, each of which is contained within a broader area. You do this when you set up your system, which we’ll get to shortly.

We give each category a number

Remember they’re grouped in tens, so our first ten categories will be numbers 10-19 and they will all be related to each other.